Hacker News Reader

Comment by yc1010 | Hacker News Reader

I am in Ireland, I wanted 1 single track (apparently there is no such thing as music shops or singles anymore, i feel old)

So I went to Amazon.com found the track for $0.99 and went to pay, guess what "your credit card has to be issued by US bank" error, despite me having positive amazon.com gift balance with no need to use credit card. Fine so I went to amazon.co.uk, same track GBP 1.00 (notice the markup) and similar error once again despite me having credit on UK site and buying for years electronics and just about everything else for myself.

So in end I went to google and found what I wanted on mp3juices.is or something like that.

These music companies deserve to go extinct for wasting half an hour of a prospective customers time and putting up silly barriers.

View on HN

It's like Game of bloody Thrones (I'm in Ireland too). I don't have a TV, so there is no way for me to pay to watch an episode

>> "I don't have a TV"

You can't watch a TV show because you don't own a TV? /s sorry couldn't resist.

> These music companies deserve to go extinct for wasting half an hour of a prospective customers time and putting up silly barriers.

Let's face it, they don't want your type. Ownership is dying. It is much more profitable to renegotiate with the consumers that fear losing "their" music collection the price of a subscription service every once in a while.

Subscriptions don't work well for the long tail, artists that aren't extremely popular get pennies and people in SF and LA live in some sort of bubble, as subscriptions aren't that popular compared to personal music collections. IMHO, it's a passing trend, just like CDs and iPods. And don't get me wrong, as subscriptions are somewhat convenient, problem is they are convenient for personal usage and listening to music is often a group activity, with sharing without barriers and taking things offline being the norm.

Do you know why YouTube is so popular for listening to music? It's because of things like http://www.youtube-mp3.org/

It's not much more profitable to move to subscription model. According to Billboard's new measuring mechanisms, 1500 streams = 1 album sale. By that measure, only a handful of artists have gone 'platinum' in the streaming sense.

Music is never going back to the cassette/CD golden age of sales, but streaming seems like the best way to salvage the few paying customers left.

This is so true. I find it the same with BBC IPlayer - I live in the UK but travel home regularly, and have a 3 hour train journey. Despite having an active Sky subscription in the UK, and paying a TV licence in the UK, if I want to watch a show hosted on iPlayer there isn't any way to do it from Ireland. I normally end up having to download them before I go from other sources, which I hate doing..

I believe the BBC should hand out a username/password with the license fee for access to their online services. Maybe this would require a change to their charter.

You can download it directly from the BBC using get_iplayer

http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html

Wasn't aware of that, thanks!

Also, for anyone wondering why the parent poster didn't just use an Irish regional version of Amazon - there isn't one. amazon.ie is just a redirect to amazon.co.uk, and the UK site has been for Irish customers too for a long time (including options for euro currency, free delivery etc)

Belgium has similar problems. Frankly, the is the one place I want to see the EU actually take action and remove national sovereignty. This is supposed to be one marketplace so the EU needs to actually enforce some sort common market for digital goods. "You may not sell a product or service in one member state without the product or service being available to all member states."

The EU is actively trying to do this: http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market/

In fairness, I would say that this is an issue with money/banking/credit cards and the various regulatory frameworks in this area.

It is remarkably difficult to just trade money in exchange for goods and services online. Between fraud, transaction costs, anti-"money laundering" requirements and general complexity the systems that actually exist are just not very good. If you fall outside the realm of a simple money-in-exchange-for-stuff paradigm, you are screwed.

Actual online retailers interfacing with customers need to make this mess as invisible as possible, but they are working with crappy inputs.

I increasingly suspect that the banking industry is the biggest economic bottleneck in advanced economies.

Actually in this case I had a positive USD credit/balance on amazon.com account due to giftcards I bought with bitcoin via gyft.com, same with amazon.co.uk with giftcard bought via giftoff.com using Bitcoin again.

3-4 year old amazon account with long history of purchases going into 6 digits, no chargebacks (not possible obviously) and my Irish debit card also on file with them.

The risk of fraud/charback to Amazon (either US or UK branch) was exactly zero with me.

> this is an issue with money/banking/credit cards and the various regulatory frameworks in this area

No, this is an issue with streams of bits being considered goods that have to be traded differently depending on the region, and that responsibility lies entirely with music distributors. If there was a single global license for selling a given piece of music, it wouldn't matter what you're buying, how you're buying it or where from.

Could be a territorial copyright issue. Mechanical license rights, in my experience, aren't global.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com